War of the First Coalition

The War of the First Coalition (20 April 1792-18 October 1797) was the first of the French Revolutionary Wars, occurring from 1792 to 1797. The war was fought between the French First Republic and a coalition of the powerful reactionary monarchies of the rest of Europe, chief among them the Holy Roman Empire, Prussia, and Great Britain, with Spain and the United Provinces briefly assisting the coalition. The war was provoked by the French Revolution, which saw the people of France rise up and force King Louis XVI of France to become the head of a "Kingdom of the French", a constitutional monarchy that was effectively governed by the radical Jacobins of the National Assembly and the National Convention. King Louis, a virtual prisoner in Paris, appealed to his brother-in-law, Emperor Francis II, to help him in regaining power, and Francis' Austria and Frederick William III's Prussia formed an anti-French pact under the 27 August 1791 Declaration of Pillnitz.

In April 1792, the French declared war on Austria and Prussia in the hopes of launching a preemptive attack against their powerful enemies, and their forces would overrun the Austrian Netherlands. However, the Austro-Prussian army of Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick invaded France in the autumn of 1792, and the French were almost driven back to Paris itself. However, the French counterattacked against the coalition army in the Battle of Valmy, a small skirmish that would lead to the Austro-Prussian withdrawal. After this battle, national pride surged among the French people, who decided to officially end the monarchy and create the French First Republic. After Great Britain, Spain, and the pseudo-republican United Provinces allied with the coalition against France, France declared war on the three countries, adding more enemies to the coalition. The French fought the Spanish to a stalemate in the Pyrenees and battled Austrian and Prussian armies in the Flanders region (now Belgium), and the French suffered several reverses over the course of 1793. An Anglo-Spanish fleet occupied the port of Toulon, the Austrians defeated the French at the Battle of Neerwinden, French Royalists began an insurrection in the Vendee region of western France, and the French government was shaken by a political crisis that resulted in the Reign of Terror. However, the French general Napoleon Bonaparte succeeded in retaking Toulon at the end of the year, and the years 1794-1795 would see the French recover from their string of defeats. The French army occupied the Austrian Netherlands after the Battle of Fleurus and the Battle of Tourcoing, two decisive victories over their Austrian enemies, and the Prussians decided to withdraw from the battlefront in 1794. In 1795, France made peace with Spain, the Netherlands, and Prussia, and France allied with Spain and the newly-created "Batavian Republic" in the Netherlands, turning them against their former allies. The French general Napoleon Bonaparte, who had been given command of the Armee d'Italie after crushing the 13 Vendemiaire uprising in Paris, led his army on a campaign of conquest in northern Italy, conquering the Republic of Venice, liberating the Austrian-held territories in the north, and defying the Papal States with his capture of Ancona. Napoleon would drive all the way up to Klagenfurt in Carinthia, threatening the Austrian capital of Vienna itself. Pressured by major defeats in both Italy and on the Rhineland frontier of western Germany, Emperor Francis II decided to make peace with France. France's existence as a republic was confirmed, French client republics were created in the Netherlands and northern Italy, and all countries except for Great Britain withdrew from the coalition.